The Renault Open Innovation Lab – Le Square, located at République in central Paris in the midst of startups and university research organisations, puts Renault’s internal teams in touch with external partners.

An Open Innovation Lab focusing on the future of mobility

Renault Open Innovation Lab – Le Square aims to define new ways of working and to explore the future of mobility by opening up the company’s boundaries and encouraging cooperation around new kinds of business organisation with actors from the French ecosystem.

“Renault has been making cars for over 100 years”, says Pierrick Cornet, Alliance Global Director of Advanced Engineering. “But as our industry is changing very rapidly, we have to stay at the leading edge and continuously innovate by working on new technologies, connected cars and electric vehicles, defining the future of mobility so we can offer our customers the best service possible.”

Renault Innovation Lab – Le Square has been designed as a truly experimental laboratory, open to its business environment and close to the Renault and Renault-Nissan Alliance teams to make the proliferation of ideas easier. Managed jointly by Renault’s internal teams and external partners working towards a common goal, it will help to reinforce the innovation strategy of Renault and the Alliance.

After Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, Renault chose France as the location for the third Renault Innovation Lab because the country already has 228 business incubators and 49 accelerators. The Ile de France region alone has over 3,000 startups(1). Moreover, Paris is ranked fourth among the most attractive world capitals for investors, who consider Paris a city conducive to advanced technology(2).

Open Innovation at Renault:

The establishment of Open Innovation Labs forms part of the culture and innovation strategy of the Renault-Nissan Alliance: they enable opportunities for innovation to be cultivated on the basis of an open ecosystem (startups, universities, investors) and the local economy (local authorities, community organisations, customers, the market).

These labs bring together under one roof the three pillars of open innovation: pooling knowledge (events, conferences, think tanks, meetups); creativity and innovative design methods (design thinking, Fablab); plus of course the levers of the new economy (start-up accelerators, cooperative and open methods, and platforms).

Two other Open Innovation Labs elsewhere in the world

– The Tel Aviv Open Innovation Lab in Israel, opened in June 2016, sets out to promote the electric vehicle and to encourage creativity focusing on the mobility of the future. It is located on the premises of the Porter School of Environmental Studies, Tel Aviv’s famous technological university, and is working in particular on the themes of the electric vehicle, aftersales, and internet security. This innovation laboratory is the result of cooperation between Renault, as part of the Renault-Nissan Alliance and the Tel Aviv Institute of Innovation in Transportation.

– The Silicon Valley Open Innovation Lab in the United States, opened in 2011, was the first innovation initiative. It looked towards the ecosystem of worldwide startups and the Californian universities of Stanford and Berkeley. This lab is contributing to the research efforts of the Alliance into autonomous driving, and especially the development of Artificial Intelligence. It is developing innovative connected services in cooperation with Silicon Valley startups, and examining new approaches to mobility.